“No matter how much you learn, it’s pointless unless you teach it to the next generation.”
Kirk Kanesaka, assistant professor of Japanese in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, attributes this quote to his grandmother. Her philosophy has shaped his work: not just as a scholar and professor, but also as an expert consultant for kabuki performance.
Kanesaka’s resume is impressive: he has provided consulting for everything from Kaiser commercials to TV specials to Netflix original films. Most recently, Kanesaka lent his expertise to Tony-award winning Signature Theater for their production of Stephen Sondheim's Pacific Overtures.
Kanesaka’s passion for kabuki started young, enrolled in Japanese dance class (nihon buyō) at age three. Japanese classical dance is foundational for other Japanese performance arts—he would go to achieve his natori (equivalent to a Master’s) and shihan (equivalent to his Ph.D.) from the Bandō school of Japanese classical dance. Throughout his training, Kanesaka found himself drawn to kabuki. Kabuki, Kanesaka explains, is about transporting the audience to different worlds: meeting heroes of legend, experiencing stories of myth, and revisiting history. “That was exciting to me, as a performer, the chance to inhabit these bodies and spaces of imagination.”
Kanesaka, a second-generation Japanese-American, did not grow up speaking, reading, or writing Japanese, instead learning these skills through Japanese studies in college. He spent a year after undergraduate in Japan, where he was recruited for a kabuki theater. He is the first non-Japanese citizen to become a professional kabuki actor since the theater’s founding in the 1500s. Through his academic and performance studies, Kanesaka began to ask, “how can we showcase kabuki as great theater in a way that non-specialist might understand?”
Historically, western theater has looked at kabuki as a niche art form. What if the world could reframe its perception to view kabuki as it views Shakespeare or ballet? Kanesaka’s kabuki master, who passed away in 2020, had a vision of kabuki as an influential, globally appreciated art. Kanesaka hopes to see that vision made reality.
Kanesaka is part of the kamigata tradition of kabuki theater: that which was developed in the upper territories of Japan around modern-day Osaka and Kyoto. This school of kabuki, Kanesaka explains, is about “making these performances the students’ own. My teachers never told me that things needed to be a specific way, but instead wanted me to observe and then progress the method, technique, or interpretation. The practice is meant to be transformed with each student.” Innovation is an expectation: a philosophy that translates to his work in consulting as well as in the classroom. For Pacific Overtures, the director and creative team were looking for that innovative perspective. “It was not about creating a perfectly authentic kabuki performance, but about a beautiful merger of kabuki principles and performance with western theatrical conventions.”
Mason, Kanesaka notes, is particularly well-positioned for this. “There is such great diversity among Mason students and faculty, and they are so open to learning about different cultures, practices, and new ways of thinking. It’s refreshing. And it goes both ways: exposure to their varied cultural viewpoints has helped shaped my studies and my work.”
April 20, 2023